In The Black Place (ii) <\/em>(2024), the relationship between body and landscape is inverted: here, the earth itself takes on sumptuous corporeal forms. Crossed with lines and recesses, the mountains in this photograph resemble the scarred, leathered skin of an elephant as much as they do creases on an aged human body. Taken collectively, these works hint at the anthropomorphizing gaze of the landscape photography genre: it is humans who organize the environmental scene into the image, who find their forms reflected in the world around them. By engaging with this genre, Armijo McKnight is in conversation with a tradition in American art that ranges from the paintings of Georgia O\u2019Keefe, to the interventions of Ana Mendieta and Laura Aguilar, to the ignominious history of the role of documentary photography in westward expansion in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the stand-out work of the show is Armijo McKnight\u2019s first foray into film, Without a Song (solo ii) <\/em>(2024). Based on a work titled Po\u00e8me Symphonique<\/em> (1962) composed by the erstwhile Fluxus contributor Gy\u00f6rgy Ligeti, Without a Song<\/em> consists primarily of a single receding shot. Over several minutes, the camera pans back from an abstracted form to reveal a chorus of metronomes scattered amidst the geological formations of the New Mexico Bisti Badlands\/De-Na-Zin Wilderness. Their conical shapes resemble the rock formations, yet they intrude as alien, surreal interlopers that solicit an allegorical reading. Thumping like heartbeats, these metronomes tick away, marking the passage of time and suggesting the end of life\u2014and, in their stoic urgency, they infuse drama into our viewing of the photographs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In its adaptation from the source material, this film raises questions about the exhibition’s central motif of decreation. Unlike Ligeti\u2019s original score, this interpretation does not include a period of silence following the winding of the metronomes, in which the audience would have anxiously awaited the beginning of the piece. Nor does it imply the humour of the score\u2019s instructions, in which the artist was tasked with sourcing metronomes from friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. What other way to put it than to say that Armijo McKnight has worked to absent the human element from this work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I therefore can\u2019t help but linger with Armijo McKnight\u2019s interest in the undoing of the self, a project that I think resonates with some of queer critical thought\u2019s most powerful interventions. He references the philosophy of Simone Weil, whose notion of decreation was meant to suggest a necessary undoing of self in relation to a higher force. But in this title, I also hear resonance with calls for impersonality and its slackened hold on the unencroachable sovereignty of the self from the domain of so-called antisocial queer theory. The late literary critic Leo Bersani wrote in his book Homos <\/em>(1995) that the \u201cnonsuicidal disappearance of the subject\u201d implicit in psychoanalytic thought\u2014and in some gay male sexual practices\u2014was a pathway toward an alternative ethical program. For Bersani, this shattering of the self relinquishes one\u2019s control over others; it does not attempt to contain difference as a wound to suture. With his characteristic delight in provocation, he asked, \u201cCan a masochistic surrender operate as effective (even powerful) resistance to coercive designs?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Armijo McKnight shares Bersani\u2019s interest in the depersonalizing masochism of sexuality. Across his oeuvre, sex tends to emerge as the site where dynamics of power and submission are exercised. These photographs are geometries of force, in which sexual positions become formal arrangements and individuals dissolve. At times bodies are reduced to sheer forms\u2014to the play of light and shadow that inheres across a field of grass, a plane of body hair. And as the fixed camera of Without a Song<\/em> steadily zooms out, metronomes and the geological formations alike abstract into shapes, lines, and patterns. There is a tension here between aspirational decreation and the necessary presence of the human who makes the subject of photography possible, in which the human who surrenders to the pleasure of pure aesthetic form chafes against indexical functions or ordering protocols intrinsic to this image-making medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Armijo McKnight\u2019s \u201cinterested gaze\u201d may invite a queer reading, as the curatorial text suggests, I wonder if there is always an erotics to the gaze that wills a landscape into being, an erotics implicit in our movement toward the aesthetic itself. More radically, I think, Armijo McKnight\u2019s aspiration toward an obliteration of the self nuances our expectation about what queer art can be. Without a Song<\/em>\u2019s body-shaking audio and long commanding shot solicit\u2014perhaps, demand\u2014submission to a force that unsettles our sovereign being. If this higher power is aesthetic rather than spiritual, Decreation<\/em> suggests that these categories might be one and the same.<\/p>\n![\"Mark-Armijo-McKnight\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/web_oct_Spencer_Mark-Armijo-McKnight_Somnia_2024.jpg\")
Somnia,<\/em> 2024.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mark-Armijo-McKnight\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/web_oct_Spencer_Mark-Armijo-McKnight_TheBlackPlaceii_2024.jpg\")
The Black Place (ii),<\/em> 2024.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Mark-Armijo-McKnight\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/web_oct_Spencer_Mark-Armijo-McKnight_Decreation_02.jpg\")
Decreation,<\/em> exhibition view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2024.
Photo: Ron Amstutz<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n